Tuesday, March 01, 2016

Second Hand Depression

"Just snap out of it. Look at your life. Look around. Think of all the good things you have," said a well meaning friend to a man with the rope around his neck. As the man inched closer to the edge of the chair he was standing on, the friend continued.

"Think about the people who don't have half the things you have. You can be sad that you don't have the best shoes, but think of the person with no feet."

The man wearing the rope collar thought about it for a moment. The chair wobbled but did not tip over. Why would this analogy cheer him up? His depression had led him to the edge of his life; to think that there was even more suffering in the world meant there was a state of existence even further down than his own. Why not end it now before life took his feet as well? He did not respond to the friend's admonition but closed his eyes and lowered his head as if to more intently listen.

"Today is first day of the rest of your life. There is so much more for you to do. All those bad times are past. Tomorrow is a new day."

With that the man opened his eyes and slowly took the rope from around his neck. He carefully and purposefully stepped off the chair and stood facing his friend.

"There you go. See life is really not that bad, it's all in the way you look at it. I think very soon you will see that this depression of yours is just a passing bad mood. I predict that you will start to feel better right away."

Suddenly and with purpose the man balled up his fist and fueled a round house punch that struck the friend very hard in the face momentarily knocking him lifelessly to the floor.

"You're right," the man said,"I do feel a little better."

Try and tell a person with stage four cancer that it is all in the way they see their disease. Get over it and think of the people who are in stage five of their cancer? If a depressive could have empathy for someone else at the moment of their despair they would not be depressed. The emotion you are telling them to experience is the very one they are unable to express. You can not see the light if you are unable to open your eyes.

It is bad enough that the entire world is stressing the negative aspects of humanity right now. Trash talking everything from religion, to ethnic groups, to government, to scandal to how much a person sweats. It is a constant 24/7 stream of nonsense, only interrupted by commercials for medications to make something better; better if you do not suffer the laundry list of complications that can be worse than the problem. There is, however, no pill that can make the insanity of what passes for news go away.

They always say the same thing about a mass murderer. "No one knows what made him/her snap." Really, we don't know? Read all the Facebook posts to your news feed for a couple of days or turn on the television and stream CNN and Fox News for a day or two. It will make you feel mad, then fearful and eventually hopelessly numb. If you have the brain chemistry that some of us have you might continue on to anxiety, depression, suicide or possibly murder. A lot of people disregard the evidence that we humans are causing global climate change, so how can we ever get them to believe that humans are also creating a mental climate change as well. Pollution of the information highway causing aggression and rage? surely that can't be.

2015 was the hottest year in recorded history. What about violence and crime?

Stop telling me it is all in my head. Stop telling me I'm better off than some. Stop telling me to just get over it. Perhaps you should just STOP TELLING ME... anything. The "second hand opinions" are killing some of us quicker than tobacco smoke.